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"Will you keep out all the sadness?" a mild feral thing asks in Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze's imperfectly perfect screen adaptation of the classic bedtime story.

An adult would know the "correct" answer to that question, which the movie brilliantly explores, although the child in all of us wants it not to be so.

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The kid to whom the heartfelt query is addressed, a boisterous 9-year-old named Max, is likewise resisting the rising tide of maturity. He just wants to have a "wild rumpus" with his strange new woodland pals, who have crowned him king of their dusty jungle. Reality can wait, if only for a moment.

The key to appreciating Where the Wild Things Are is in this statement by director Jonze: "I didn't set out to make a children's movie; I set out to make a movie about childhood."

It's worth bearing in mind if you're intending to take a very young tot to see this film. What Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers have wrought in adapting Maurice Sendak's 1963 picture book perennial is something so primal, and so in touch with the rough "id" of youthful fantasy, it would be easy to dismiss as a simple kid's story.

And a primitive one at that. Where the Wild Things Are uses puppets instead of computers (although CGI rendering was needed for facial expressions), a sailboat instead of a rocket ship and dirt clods instead of guns or bombs. It's the antithesis of modern kidpix, which seem to require all manner of digital hokum and gee-willikers 3-D eyestrain to be fully worthy of infantile attention.

This movie makes a virtue out of minimalism, and of intention rather than action, and as a result it may appeal more to nostalgic parents than to their restless offspring.

But it's a joy for thinking moviegoers of any age. It doesn't seek to "keep out all the sadness," yet neither does it wallow in gloom. Instead it presents childhood as a journey filled with things both wonderful and fearful, and ultimately all of the mind.

A lot of credit for this must go to the marvellous Max Records, just 12 years old (and age 10 and 11 when he started making this), who anchors the film with his completely natural portrayal of the adventurous protagonist Max. He's in almost every frame of the film, yet he never mugs for the camera or wears out his welcome. He is, quite literally, a force of nature, dressed in a wolf costume that makes him look like an escapee from a school stage production of Winnie the Pooh.

Acres of copy have been written about the difficulties Jonze had in persuading Warner Bros. to make Where the Wild Things Are his own obtuse way. He wanted to use tactile puppets rather than ethereal digits to render Sendak's brilliantly drawn vision of creatures that are more fearful than ferocious, and more lost than truly wild.

Jonze was right, although you can see why the studio balked at first. The giant forest creatures voiced by James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara, Lauren Ambrose, Chris Cooper, Forest Whitaker and Paul Dano are so handmade and primal, they come as a shock to the system. Is this some kind of joke?

Then you realize – which in my case took a second viewing – that we've become so accustomed to digital doohickery, we don't know what to make of something tangibly real. When these creatures knock each other about, you actually see the fur fly and the dust rise. When someone or something is hit by a dirt clod, in the contest organized by Max to keep sadness at bay, they actually react in pain and cry out.

Jonze and Eggers are highly cerebral and ultra-cool hepcats, one celebrated for his innovative films (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) and the other for a zeitgeist-rattling memoir (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius).

Yet both have wisely resisted any temptation to turn Sendak's slim book into some kind of smug ironic atrocity. They approach childhood straight on, remembering their own boyhoods of chasing dogs, arguing with annoying sisters and moms, and throwing dirt clods at both real and imaginary foes.

They've taken a tale that can be read in the time it takes to check under the bed for monsters, and fleshed it out with a back story about Max being the lonely son of a single mother (Catherine Keener), who rebels by grabbing a neighbour's sailboat and heading to points and creatures unknown – which in reality may be no further than the door of his bedroom and the limits of his vivid imagination.

Jonze and Eggers have given the wild things names and personalities, from the sulky and jealous Carol (Gandolfini) to the snippy Judith (O'Hara) to the nurturing KW (Ambrose). They could have gone further – the rest of the characters are barely differentiated and the narrative occasionally creaks from lack of momentum. The ethereal soundtrack by Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O and Coen Bros. regular Carter Burwell perfectly sets the mood.

"You're out of control!" various characters shout.

Fortunately, the movie never is. It keeps us firmly in its grasp, taking us to the land where childhood forever roams and rages.

The trailer of Where the Wild Things Are and other films at thestar.com/movies

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